A chaotic Southern childhood

Frances Mayes’ lyrical memoir of growing up Southern was a long time coming. Worried about upsetting her family, she stopped and started Under Magnolia many times over: “Anytime I felt the impulse to start my Southern opus again, I instead headed for a movie or a new Thai restaurant,” she writes. “I’d go jogging or read a novel until the impulse faded.”

Magnolia memories

In a frank and richly evocative memoir, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun recalls growing up in the Deep South.

Why did you feel now was the right time to write a memoir of your coming-of-age?

Moving from California (where I lived and worked for decades) back to the South reconnected me on many levels with the land I came from originally. Some of the connections were simple and primitive—the fecund and flowery smells, the cheerful sounds of the tree frogs, the grating drama of cicadas, the grand sunsets and the intense humidity.

Out of Tuscany

Life in the hills of Italy seems so fulfilling for Frances Mayes, one might wonder why she would ever leave, even if, as she says, she can no longer sit quietly reading at the local trattorias and cafes. It was an ongoing search for places that feel as comfortable as her adopted Tuscan hometown of Cortona that inspired the grand tour at the...

Bella Tuscany

Ever since she decided to buy the rundown farmhouse Bramasole and document her adventures in Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes has turned a twist of fate into a one-woman promotional machine for la dolce vita. Her latest book, Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy, is another astutely observed memoir about life alla Italiana. Writing with her husband Edward, this time...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes's thoroughly charming, often wise, celebration cum memoir of renovating an abandoned villa in southern Tuscany is, to me, a perfect example of the pleasures of audio. I don't read much nonfiction, but I found this audio version as irresistible as the Tuscan countryside and lifestyle Ms. Mayes so fondly describes. As she reads in her gentle Georgia...

Under the Tuscan sun again

Frances Mayes, the Peter Mayle of Italy, has done a difficult thing. Bella Tuscany (6 hours), her second book is even better than her best-selling first. After seven summers of restoration, Mayes's beloved villa, Bramasole, needs only a few finishing touches and she can spend more time pondering The Sweet Life in Italy. Mayes looks at the world with an artist's eye and writes with a...